When seeing is believing in the city of the dead

Friday 5 October 2001 21.18 EDT
First published on Friday 5 October 2001 21.18 EDT

North of Canal Street, it's possible at times to forget the events of September 11. Restaurants are filling up with New Yorkers eager to resume their traditional social rituals. So, I'm told, are the nightclubs. After much soul searching, the organisers of such annual social events as the Rita Hayworth Ball for the benefit of Alzheimer's research have decided to procede on Ocober 9 as scheduled, (although the dress code has been downgraded to "informal".)

"I went uptown for a few hours last week," says Bruce Grulikshes, a carpenter who was one of the first people to start digging out the rubble of the World Trade Centre that Tuesday morning. "It was weird, it was like nothing had happened. People were going about their business, doing their thing. I gotta say, I found it kind of bizarre, kind of offensive. I came back here. This is reality. I belong down here."

"Here" is Ground Zero and vicinity, behind the police barricades and checkpoints which separate what the signs call "the crime scene" from the rest of Manhattan. It's a world unto itself, populated by men and women in uniforms, a place in which the concept of normality seems almost obscene.

For the past week, I have been working on and off at a soup kitchen a few hundred yards from the World Trade Centre site, making sandwiches and coffee for the national guardsmen, the policemen and firemen and the rescue workers who work 12- hour shifts inside this city within the city. Once in a while I enlist one of the cops to drive me uptown to pick up more elaborate fare from restaurants owned by friends.

Like Bruce Grulikshes, I find it strange to return to the world above Canal Street, where you cannot smell the sickening, acrid smoke of the rubble that's still burning. It's a little disconcerting, for instance, to see civilians wearing camouflage pants when you've spent eight hours in the company of army and marine reservists.

Situated at Bowling Green, a small park on what is believed be the site where Peter Minuit arranged to purchase the island of Manhattan from the native inhabitants, the soup kitchen was created by an actor named Christian Camargo, who arrived in the area the day after the collapse of the towers with a van full of food. Since then an expanding network of friends has kept the place going.

It is one of several ad hoc operations within the disaster area, including one sponsored by the four-star chef David Bouley. One night I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches alongside a volunteer who could not hide her disappointment at the fact that she had been unable to sign on with the Bouley operation - her belief in the social hierarchies of uptown, pre-attack Manhattan miraculously intact. She left after a few hours and I haven't seen her since.

Bruce Grulikshes has been working at the soup kitchen for the past two weeks, after spending four days digging in the rubble. As soon as he heard about the first plane crashing into the north tower he reported to his union office, collected a respirator and equipment and drove down to the site, arriving shortly after the collapse of the second tower. For the next 16 hours he worked alongside fireman, digging with his hands and passing along buckets of debris.

"You don't want to know what I found," he says, glassy-eyed after weeks with little sleep. "I knew we weren't going to find anybody alive in there. I found body parts. After four days I'd had enough." At some point he will have to come to terms with what he has seen but now he has the serenity of purposefulness and exhaustion. He has refused the services of the various grief and trauma counsellors who are on the scene.

He moved a few blocks away to the soup kitchen, unable to leave the area, unready and unwilling to resume his old, diurnal routine, unable to relate to those who are beginning to try to act as if nothing happened.

It turns out that years ago, we met each other, saw each other, in a different world. Bruce G, his nom de nuit , owned and managed several nightclubs. With a certain sheepishness, we both acknowledged our acquaintance in that distant past.

The unspoken, dirty secret of each new volunteer at the soup kitchen is that we want to see it. We want to help, we want to do something to feel less helpless, less useless. But we also want to see the site, to witness the destruction, to be able to say, in the future, that we saw it, our guilt at this voyeuristic impulse assuaged, if only partially, by the sense that we have done something to earn it.

We are no different in this regard from the tourists who pour into the financial district on the weekends, taking the subway down to Wall Street and walking over to Broadway with their cameras, buying American-flag lapel pins and postcards showing the twin towers from the Chinese women who line the street.

 It's possible to approach within some five blocks of Ground Zero, to see a sliver of the smoking ruins between the buildings. The veterans, like Grulikshes, all say that you can't imagine it until you have seen it, that the images on television can't prepare you for the actual sight. The truth is, I'm not sure you can imagine it after you've seen it.

After two night shifts I felt I'd earned my close look. Shortly before dawn, during a lull at the soup kitchen, I enlisted a national guardsman I'd befriended who was in command of a Cushman, a golf cart-like vehicle. As the volunteer on duty with the most seniority, it was my turn. We loaded up the back of the cart with coffee and sandwiches, water and soft drinks, and set off down West Street, handing out the supplies to the cops and national guardsmen who manned the checkpoints, who thanked us and let us pass, until finally we found ourselves at the edge of the rubble in the vast, garishly illuminated amphitheatre carved out of the cityscape by the destruction of the towers.

They were right, those who had been there before me: the images on your television screen can't begin to convey the scale of the destruction. But what I was most unprepared for was the visceral sensation of being in the presence of the thousands of dead. After that, I dimly remember handing out sandwiches to the firemen and the salvage workers, feeling the heat of the fires burning beneath me through the soles of my trainers.

I remember looking up at one point, after passing a cup of coffee to a fireman, and admiring the filigreed beauty of the exoskeleton of the south tower, rising eight stories above the rubble, strangely lacy and delicate in the unnatural, movie-set light.

The next night, after showering three times to try to remove the smell of smoke, I attended a dinner party in the West Village. As I dressed I envisioned myself among my friends at the dinner table, describing the scene, diagnosing the mood at Ground Zero. In the end I felt inadequate to the task, somehow unable to find the right moment to introduce my observations from the war zone over short ribs and Echezeaux, although unlike Bruce G, I was grateful to be back in the world above Canal Street.